How Nintendo’s Social Play is a Big Deal

Is Nintendo’s Miiverse a reflection of the company’s relative sluggishness in grappling with the social networking problem, a 'Mii-too' play? Or is there something much, much smarter going on here?

Nintendo is one of the biggest entertainment brands in the world but unlike many of its rivals, it didn't embrace Twitter and Facebook. Here is a company with a long and notorious history of splendid isolation, of doing things at its own speed and eschewing much of what goes on outside its own direct interests. Witness the company’s incredible tardiness in modern online play and the move from cartridges to disks.

However, at E3 Nintendo showed us a few glimpses of Miiverse, its online social community for the Wii U, and planned also for 3DS and even (in some capacity) non-Nintendo devices.

In a recent interview with Kotaku, Nintendo chief Satoru Iwata spoke about his vision of Miiverse, and it’s clear that he and his cohorts have been doing what Nintendo does best - thinking hard about how people like to play and about how they connect emotionally with games.

In the past, this was a one-on-one transaction; we each bonded individually with Nintendo characters, games and mechanics. Playing with other people or talking about Nintendo games on, say, the school bus were ancillary social activities, connected tenuously with the activity of playing.

Now, Nintendo understands that we are connecting with our games collectively, that we are almost unable to enjoy entertainments without ‘sharing’ the experience.

Iwata said, "Early on, when I played a Mario game, it was really fun for me to sit and chat with my friends about, 'hey I found coins over here, there's a hidden place.' That interaction was great. Of course the Internet does provide a lot of that interaction, but it's not built for that purpose. For example, Facebook is something that connects you socially with a lot of different folks, but that doesn't guarantee that the people you are going to have interactions with via Facebook are interested in games.”

Miiverse is not merely an attempt to replicate a successful social network like Facebook. The time for such things has long-since passed. It is a recognition that generic social networks do not fit with the specific needs of the gamer at the point of play. Usefully, this plays well to Nintendo’s strengths and to its needs.

Anyone who has used Facebook or Twitter will recognize that much of what other people share seems like drivel. Either it is too generic to be interesting (“I am at the movies!”) or it is way too specific to appeal to most of us (“Just bought a Sig P-239 and a Mosquito”). Obviously, some of what we read on social networks is relevant and interesting to us, otherwise we wouldn’t use them, but this problem of generic-ness rubbing up against irrelevant-specificity is endemic.

Google recognized this problem and so created Google Circles as a central platform for its social network play Google Plus, in which users could arrange friends according to common interests. And while this was a really smart idea, the network as a whole has not taken off.

Iwata said, “What I'm saying is that I don't believe that the life experiences that you have - and those might be with the people you are connected with on Facebook - are not equal to the gaming experiences you might have with a lot of different folks. I feel that we need to create-or present-a gaming platform as the place to create that 'social graph' for folks who are in gaming circles, I guess. So that's kind of the reason for creating Miiverse,"

Nintendo’s network is hard-wired into the entertainment experience of playing Nintendo games, and is relevant at the point of play. It helps that Nintendo’s culture has always been about sharing, from cosplay Mario characters to the thrill of having letters published in Nintendo Power.

When Iwata spoke in that strange, little E3 video, he began in that stiff-backed way of an uncomfortable teleprompter reader. But as he warmed to his theme, he soon began to relax and move his arms about and bob his head. He talked enthusiastically about the issue of “empathy” in gamers. It’s difficult to think about this word as a core component of a hardware launch from the engineer-cultures of Sony and Microsoft. But for Nintendo and Iwata, emotion is always at the center of everything.

Wii and motion-gaming was not merely a technical achievement but an innovation in understanding how and why people play together. Miiverse feels like something similar.

Perhaps the fairly muted response to Miiverse thus far has to do with Nintendo's weirdly schizophrenic relationship with online connectivity and social gaming. The company had an online strategy for Famicom (Japanese and Asian NES) back in the 1980s, with its Famicom Modem. Through the 1990s, it spear-headed lots of efforts to get people playing together in four-play and split-screen modes, championing gaming as a social activity. And yet, when online play became de rigueur, it seemed to step back and allow others to come to the fore.

Wii offered a robust online plan with Virtual Console, but it wasn't of the multiplayer hardcore-competition variety favored by Microsoft, Sony, and millions of console and PC gamers. Indeed, you get the impression from Nintendo's presentations so far, that brutal contests and male-dominated death-arenas are something the company wants to offer up only as a smaller part of as larger social role, important, yes, but not central to the emotional timbre of the experience.

Nintendo seems to have pulled together all the strands - of connected gaming, its own favored in-game culture of non-aggressive gaming, the necessary technology and hard-earned lessons about social connectivity.

Inside Miiverse, at least according to Nintendo's vision, we are not merely part of a community of Nintendo fans or ‘gamers’. The network is designed to cluster members around individual games, bringing an overall feeling of community around those games but also a high level of specificity (such as game-tips).

And game developers are being encouraged to find ways to braid Miiverse into their creations. The community is not separate from the gaming experience, like the anodyne PlayStation Home. Nor is it merely a matchmaking matrix, as Xbox Live was originally designed to be. It is a post-social-revolution social play, something knowing and smart.

Nintendo understands that consumers are less likely today to self-identify as ‘gamers’, but as a specific kind of gamer. They tie their loyalties not to the activity as a whole but to the games they play. And so Miiverse isn’t, as is being suggested by some, a social network for gamers, but a social-extension for Wii U games.

The GamePad touch-screen controller adds a practical dimension to Miiverse, as Iwata says, allowing easy texting, jotting and drawing as well as reading of other messages. These are the ways in which we communicate with one another via mobile devices, but texting is not easily done with game controllers. Note how Microsoft is now scrambling to connect its gaming experiences to handheld, touchscreen pads.

The mass-market desirability of Nintendo’s touch-screen, as Wii U’s ‘Unique Selling Point’, is still an unknown. But married to Miiverse, it makes more sense. It would be no surprise at all to see Miiverse being talked up a great deal as we move into Wii U’s launch phase, and as Nintendo seeks ways to entice buyers with its own brand of touchy-feely community.

Iwata said, “What we really want to do is create a place where folks who are playing by themselves will not feel like they are playing by themselves. "